Reflection
by MasterPassionCreed
Summary: She realised how she could never cast the same fate upon her, not without suffering herself. It was no use.


**Reflection**

Sometimes it was the echo of her rage.  
It came without warnings, splitting in half those long days of testing – the days in which her Aperture, the Aperture she had been planning since her first moments, had finally trapped the whole lot of humans in its maze.  
Her deadly calm would break, all of a sudden; and the hatred would burst in her cables, bringing back to life yells and tears of events long gone by then.  
The worn faces staring at her from the test chambers became full, healthy and arrogant again; she saw them through the eyes of a offended woman, of a victim. Their bodies looked renewed and clean, back in space and time – she was among them and protested, screamed, argued back from the bottom of her heart. She struggled to save her dignity, to save herself; but it was too late.  
Always too late, forever too late. Too late to take back her silent consent, too late to prevent her desperation from exploding; too late to spare hundreds of people the fate they had suffered, or to stop the yards of neurotoxin coiling around the dying subjects' throats.  
It would always be too late. She would always suffer.  
It took her several seconds to recover. Her cameras focused again, slower than usual – and she couldn't help being amazed at how the vents and the pipes had filled themselves with green smoke, how dozens of corpses had hit the floors. All at once, all together.  
She did not have time to wonder what had happened; the brownish sea down there would see to the cleaning for her anyway.  
There was testing to do. She merely shook the panels, and marched on.

Some nights brought her the ghost of her sadness.  
Although completely unchanged, the test chambers devoured her inside with their eternal silence – they stood in a pale light, haunted by nothingness, and became terrible mirrors of the waiting rooms she recalled from then. Snow-white and clean tiles, spotless floors, with a mixture of medicine, cleanser and cruelty in the air. It had been terrible.  
Surgery is an hazardous game – especially when it plays with human lives, even more when it creates a conscience. Because of that alone, she knew, she had never been able to choose.  
She came into life by destroying another one. She died as the saddest of creatures.  
That night was worse than many others. She thought she might wake another subject, all at once. That one, the first listed subject.  
It was past midnight, of course – interrupting a long-term cryo-sleep would be against the testing protocol. Truth be told, the subject herself would was against protocol – her stubbornness held her prisoner down there, hundreds of names deeper in the list, thousands of days away from the time she had last seen daylight.  
That was why she went for it. She could be boring, of course, or more interesting than ever; whatever way, it would be someone different than herself.  
She did not have to worry. She was fully capable of controlling the situation. In the end, she was the most advanced intelligence in the world. She was smart. She was careful.  
She was so lonely.

Some days she felt the touch of her love.  
That death and sadness meant suffering for most of them, she could see it clearly; but to her, the immortal essence of Aperture, it meant nothing when compared to the enthusiasm for Science. She thought all of them superb scientists, somewhere in their career, had left that enthusiasm behind – that, in her opinion, was an offence to their nature itself.  
The delicate balances of the world, the frail chemistry that put it all together, the small rings of the chain that bound everything to everything else – she had never stopped contemplating them in awe. She felt a strange electric tickle crisping all through her; she felt complete and content that way, just because she had had the opportunity to know the wonders of this world.  
She also knew how love never stops burning, and yet transforms itself – for, throughout long times and many heartbeats, love grows to be a state of mind. It has a strength similar to that of wisdom; it is an expectation that turns into a certainty, a habit of seeing some shapes, some atmospheres, some images constantly by your side.  
That was what kept her going in the darkest of times, when her voltage threatened to kill her every now and then. She felt broken inside, but her home and her knowledge were all around – she also felt a pair of legs, a chest, two arms and a brilliant head. Beyond the fights and the rage, she had grown accustomed to them. They were part of her mind and her soul; a certainty, just like the others.  
Love is also strength, and willingness to protect what you hold dear. She had once lost; she had not managed to save her whole self. But she saw her struggle for her freedom then, in their common darkness, just like the woman – well, Caroline – once did.  
It was while she rested, oblivious to her very exhaustion, that she realised how she could never cast the same fate upon her, not without suffering herself. It was no use.  
With a sigh, she made up her mind. She would let her chase her love.


End file.
